About the OADP Data Mover - OADP Application backup and restore | Backup and restore

Enabling the built-in Data Mover
Built-in Data Mover controller and custom resource definitions (CRDs)
About incremental back up support

OADP includes a built-in Data Mover that you can use to move Container Storage Interface (CSI) volume snapshots to a remote object store. The built-in Data Mover allows you to restore stateful applications from the remote object store if a failure, accidental deletion, or corruption of the cluster occurs. It uses Kopia as the uploader mechanism to read the snapshot data and write to the unified repository.

OADP supports CSI snapshots on the following:

Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation
Any other cloud storage provider with the Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver that supports the Kubernetes Volume Snapshot API

The OADP built-in Data Mover, which was introduced in OADP 1.3 as a Technology Preview, is now fully supported for both containerized and virtual machine workloads.

Enabling the built-in Data Mover

To enable the built-in Data Mover, you must include the CSI plugin and enable the node agent in the DataProtectionApplication custom resource (CR). The node agent is a Kubernetes daemonset that hosts data movement modules. These include the Data Mover controller, uploader, and the repository.

Example DataProtectionApplication manifest

apiVersion: oadp.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: DataProtectionApplication
metadata:
  name: dpa-sample
spec:
  configuration:
    nodeAgent:
      enable: true (1)
      uploaderType: kopia (2)
    velero:
      defaultPlugins:
      - openshift
      - aws
      - csi (3)
      defaultSnapshotMoveData: true
      defaultVolumesToFSBackup: (4)
      featureFlags:
      - EnableCSI
# ...

1	The flag to enable the node agent.
2	The type of uploader. The possible values are `restic` or `kopia`. The built-in Data Mover uses Kopia as the default uploader mechanism regardless of the value of the `uploaderType` field.
3	The CSI plugin included in the list of default plugins.
4	In OADP 1.3.1 and later, set to `true` if you use Data Mover only for volumes that opt out of `fs-backup`. Set to `false` if you use Data Mover by default for volumes.

Built-in Data Mover controller and custom resource definitions (CRDs)

The built-in Data Mover feature introduces three new API objects defined as CRDs for managing backup and restore:

DataDownload: Represents a data download of a volume snapshot. The CSI plugin creates one DataDownload object per volume to be restored. The DataDownload CR includes information about the target volume, the specified Data Mover, the progress of the current data download, the specified backup repository, and the result of the current data download after the process is complete.
DataUpload: Represents a data upload of a volume snapshot. The CSI plugin creates one DataUpload object per CSI snapshot. The DataUpload CR includes information about the specified snapshot, the specified Data Mover, the specified backup repository, the progress of the current data upload, and the result of the current data upload after the process is complete.
BackupRepository: Represents and manages the lifecycle of the backup repositories. OADP creates a backup repository per namespace when the first CSI snapshot backup or restore for a namespace is requested.

About incremental back up support

OADP supports incremental backups of block and Filesystem persistent volumes for both containerized, and OpenShift Virtualization workloads. The following table summarizes the support for File System Backup (FSB), Container Storage Interface (CSI), and CSI Data Mover:

Table 1. OADP backup support matrix for containerized workloads
Volume mode	FSB - Restic	FSB - Kopia	CSI	CSI Data Mover
Filesystem	S ^[1], I ^[2]	S ^[1], I ^[2]	S ^[1]	S ^[1], I ^[2]
Block	N ^[3]	N ^[3]	S ^[1]	S ^[1], I ^[2]

Table 2. OADP backup support matrix for OpenShift Virtualization workloads
Volume mode	FSB - Restic	FSB - Kopia	CSI	CSI Data Mover
Filesystem	N ^[3]	N ^[3]	S ^[1]	S ^[1], I ^[2]
Block	N ^[3]	N ^[3]	S ^[1]	S ^[1], I ^[2]

Backup supported
Incremental backup supported
Not supported

The CSI Data Mover backups use Kopia regardless of uploaderType.